MacWhisper has long been one of the best and easiest ways to transcribe anything on a Mac. I’ve relied on it heavily since it launched, and I can’t recommend it enough. Today, it got even better with an update that adds support for Nvidia’s insanely fast Parakeet model. And I mean fast.
As OpenAI moves away from Whisper, MacWhisper gets a Parakeet boost
When OpenAI came out with its Whisper family of AI transcription models, they felt like magic. They were at least an order of magnitude faster and more accurate than anything else out there, especially in the open-source market.
However, as OpenAI shifted its focus to the more commercially viable gpt-4o-transcribe models, Whisper started to show its age. Soon, newer transcription models did to Whisper what it had once done to its predecessors.
Nvidia’s Parakeet is one of them. Announced just last month, it promised to transcribe “60 minutes of audio in just 1 second”, provided you had the right hardware, such as A100, H100, T4, or V100 GPUs.
Parakeet has been available through open-source tools. The catch? Not everyone is comfortable navigating command-line interfaces or managing custom model deployments.
Thankfully, that changes today: MacWhisper just added support for Nvidia’s Parakeet model, and it really is impossibly, incredibly fast. Here’s app developer Jordi Bruin:
“Thanks to our collaboration with the team at Argmax, MacWhisper now supports the Parakeet models. To show you what a big deal this is, check out the gif below where we transcribe and diarise a 30 minute podcast in under 8 seconds!”
I tested it on my M2 Pro MacBook Pro using a recent 3-hour episode of 9to5Mac Happy Hour, and it finished the job in just 1 minute and 22 seconds, speaker recognition and all.
It’s worth noting that the Parakeet model is available to Pro users and currently supports English-only transcription. Bruin says the multilingual version is coming soon.
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